Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana examines the political
economy surrounding the use of enslaved laborers in the capital of
Spanish imperial Cuba from 1762 to 1835. In this first book-length
exploration of state slavery on the island, Evelyn P. Jennings
demonstrates that the Spanish state's policies and practices in the
ownership and employment of enslaved workers after 1762 served as a
bridge from an economy based on imperial service to a rapidly
expanding plantation economy in the nineteenth century. The Spanish
state had owned and exploited enslaved workers in Cuba since the
early 1500s. After the humiliating yearlong British occupation of
Havana beginning in 1762, however, the Spanish Crown redoubled its
efforts to purchase and maintain thousands of royal slaves to
prepare Havana for what officials believed would be the imminent
renewal of war with England. Jennings shows that the composition of
workforces assigned to public projects depended on the availability
of enslaved workers in various interconnected labor markets within
Cuba, within the Spanish empire, and in the Atlantic world.
Moreover, the site of enslavement, the work required, and the
importance of that work according to imperial priorities influenced
the treatment and relative autonomy of those laborers as well as
the likelihood they would achieve freedom. As plantation production
for export purposes emerged as the most dynamic sector of Cuba's
economy by 1810, the Atlantic networks used to obtain enslaved
workers showed increasing strain. British abolitionism exerted
additional pressure on the slave trade. To offset the loss of
access to enslaved laborers, colonial officials expanded the
state's authority to sentence deserters, vagrants, and fugitives,
both enslaved and free, to labor in public works such as civil
construction, road building, and the creation of Havana's defensive
forts. State efforts in this area demonstrate the deep roots of
state enslavement and forced labor in nineteenth-century Spanish
colonialism and in capitalist development in the Atlantic world.
Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana places the processes of
building and sustaining the Spanish empire in the imperial hub of
Havana in a comparative perspective with other sites of empire
building in the Atlantic world. Furthermore, it considers the human
costs of reproducing the Spanish empire in a major Caribbean port,
the state's role in shaping the institution of slavery, and the
experiences of enslaved and other coerced laborers both before and
after the beginning of Cuba's sugar boom in the early nineteenth
century.
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